A change to the mechanism for getting Support Package Stacks after April 2007

Like many people, I occassionally hop onto the Service Market Place for example, here to see if there are any interesting patches to download.

Well, today I found this warning:

Starting on April 2nd 2007, Support Package Stack for SAP NetWeaver 2004s will ONLY be available via SAP Solution Managers Maintenance Optimizer. Find more details here http://service.sap.com/solman-mopz.

This will affect those people like myself who run a small application server on their desktop to host something like the SAP NetWeaver Portal.

While as an SAP employee I can understand somewhat the reasoning for this, I also think it will make it a lot more difficult to get acceptance for the SAP NetWeaver environment in the wider community. A simple mechanism for applying patches to software is considered necessary by many, and hiding patches behind a more complicated environment will surely have a negative impact.

5 Comments

We should be choosing to use Solution Manager because of the new functionality it provides rather than being forced to use it because necessary functionality is being moved exclusively to it.

This feels a lot like SAP finding ways to make people use Solution Manager because not many are choosing to use it.

Personally I get little benefit from SolMan other than being able to generate install keys for NetWeaver installs. This is, of course, another example of forcing people to install Solution Manager for very little gain.

I have to agree with you Michael. Whoever is in charge of the whole solution manager thing seems obsessed with forcing customers to use it. If they concentrated on making it a good product in the first place (it is getting there is release 4) and demonstrated how useful it is, then customers are much more likely to use it. However forcing anything upon customers never goes down well.

I’ve worked at many a customer site where they are running a couple of small systems. So they install solution manager temporarily to generate keys etc, then uninstall it afterwards.

while SolMan might get some adoption in the customer base, the partners should not be forced to deal with it. It’s hard enough to build new solutions using Netweaver. If we have to have SolMan on top of that, that’s not making it easy for us

I can’t help but think the use of solman is more aimed at stemming the use of unlicensed software than benefiting from solmans knowledge of the system landscape.

There are heaps of people with borrowed or stolen install CDs and still using S numbers from previous employers to download patches etc. I even know of recognized SAP implementation “partners” without software license agreements. Go figure!

I’m all for a mechanism that restricts software download to those with proper licenses – but a simple certificate based mechanism from within a licensed installation would have been adequate enough, without imposing SolMan on everybody.

At the moment I’m sure we all know of customers who get a friend to generate a license key rather than put in SolMan. I can see this carrying over to people sharing SAP patches unofficially (sort of SAPster?) with even fewer controls than you mention.